Head of government: Prime Ministers Viktor Chernomyrdin until March 23, Sergey Kiriyenko until August 23, and, from September 11, Yevgeny Primakov

Domestic Affairs

Pres. Boris Yeltsin’s health deteriorated during 1998 until he was reportedly working no more than a few hours a day. On the increasingly rare occasions that he was seen in public, Yeltsin appeared weak and confused. On a state visit to Central Asia in October, he stumbled, spoke incoherently, and signed his name slowly. By late in the year, Yeltsin’s popularity was at an all-time low, and calls for his resignation were increasing. The communist-dominated opposition launched impeachment proceedings. Yeltsin’s aides insisted that he was suffering from nothing more serious than exhaustion and would serve out his term, due to expire in mid-2000. In October, however, they announced that the president was handing day-to-day management of state affairs over to Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov (see BIOGRAPHIES) and would concentrate on ensuring a smooth succession.

Power remained a highly personalized commodity, and Yeltsin’s incapacitation contributed to the vacuum of state power that was the country’s most serious problem. Everyone agreed that the 1993 constitution, which had been tailor-made for Yeltsin, generated instability by failing to distribute power evenly between the legislature and the executive. Amending the constitution was so difficult, however, that there seemed little chance that the situation could be changed in that way. Yeltsin replaced the government twice during the year, acting each time on an apparent whim and provoking alarm about Russia’s political and economic stability. On March 23 he fired the entire Cabinet of Viktor Chernomyrdin, his prime minister of five years, saying that economic reform was not dynamic enough. Instead, Yeltsin named virtually unknown Energy Minister Sergey Kiriyenko as acting prime minister. Many expressed doubts about Kiriyenko’s youth and inexperience. The lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, rejected his candidacy twice. Only after a month-long standoff, during which Yeltsin threatened to dissolve the legislature, did the Duma on April 24 confirm Kiriyenko on the third vote.

Kiriyenko appointed a new, heavily reformist Cabinet, but concerns about the financial crisis in Asia and the slump in world oil prices were already prompting investors to withdraw from Russia. Budget cuts did nothing to restore confidence, since the main problem was seen to be not the size of the budget deficit but the fact that it was larger than the government’s ability to raise revenue. Investor confidence was further undermined by concern about the extent of Russia’s foreign indebtedness. In an effort to defend the currency and stem the flight of capital, the central bank in May hiked interest rates to a dizzying 150%. Investors were not reassured, and markets continued to plunge. As the government dug itself deeper into a pit of indebtedness, wage arrears accumulated. Coal miners were hard hit; for several weeks in the summer, they blocked sections of the Trans-Siberian railroad, effectively cutting the country in two. As time wore on, they added calls for the resignation of Yeltsin and his government to their wage demands.

Kiriyenko’s government struggled to put together a program of emergency measures to resolve the financial crisis. In July the International Monetary Fund agreed to Russia’s request for new emergency credits to prop up the ruble, putting together a package of IMF, World Bank, and Japanese government money totaling $22.6 billion. The loan depended on Russia’s fulfilling a series of measures to reduce the budget deficit by cutting expenditures and increasing tax receipts. The Duma rejected many of these measures when they were put forward by the government, approving measures that Kiriyenko said would provide only one-third of the targeted revenues. The IMF signaled its disquiet later in July by disbursing a first payment of only $4.8 billion instead of the $5.6 billion anticipated. The value of the ruble resumed its fall.

On August 17 Kiriyenko’s government and the central bank announced an effective devaluation of the ruble by extending the exchange-rate band within which the ruble traded against the dollar by 34%. The ruble promptly fell below the new "floor," and the central bank soon gave up trying to keep the currency within even the new, widened band. The government imposed restrictions on foreign exchange operations, freezing trade in short-term government debt (Treasury bills, known as GKOs) and unilaterally announcing a restructuring of that debt. It also declared a 90-day moratorium on commercial foreign debt servicing. The ruble went into free fall as Russians sought frantically to buy dollars. Western creditors lost heavily. A large part of Russia’s fledgling banking sector was destroyed, since many banks had large GKO holdings and the larger banks had substantial dollar borrowings.

A week later, on August 23, Yeltsin fired Kiriyenko and declared his intention of returning Chernomyrdin to office. This time the Duma dug in its heels. After it twice rejected Chernomyrdin’s candidacy, Yeltsin, his power clearly on the wane, backed down. Instead, he nominated Foreign Minister Primakov, who on September 11 was overwhelmingly approved by the Duma.

Primakov’s appointment restored political stability because he was seen as a compromise candidate able to heal the rifts between Russia’s quarreling interest groups. There was popular enthusiasm, too, when he promised to make the payment of wage and pension arrears his government’s first priority. Primakov invited members of all the leading parliamentary factions into his Cabinet. The appointment of Yury Maslyukov--a communist who had been the last head of the U.S.S.R. State Planning Agency--as first deputy premier in charge of the economy, however, prompted fears of a return to Soviet-era policies. Apprehension intensified with the appointment of Viktor Gerashchenko to head the central bank. Gerashchenko had held the same post in 1992-94, when he allowed a rapid growth of the money supply and thereby fueled high inflation.

Primakov’s government acted with caution, and by year’s end the feared printing of money had not begun. Primakov had great difficulty in persuading his coalition government to agree on an economic rescue program. Maslyukov’s first proposals for reviving the economy were sharply criticized by Finance Minister Mikhail Zadornov, and it was not until late October that a new draft was submitted to the IMF. This included plans to let the ruble float, introduce some price controls, and expand the role of the government in regulating the economy. Calls for government support for domestic industry were seen as a shift toward Russia’s "red directors"--the managers of big Soviet-era industrial enterprises--and away from the "oligarchs"--the small group of financiers and media tycoons who bankrolled Yeltsin’s 1996 presidential campaign and had been hard hit by the August 17 financial crisis. Calling the program a significant step backward from market reforms, the IMF expressed concern about the lack of projected cuts in public spending and continued to withhold the second installment of its emergency loan, originally due in September. In late October the national and regional governments together took control of Kamaz, Russia’s largest manufacturer of trucks, in return for assuming approximately one-third of its debts.

Inflation was 84.4% in 1998, up from 11% in 1997 and eating away at popular living standards. Gross domestic product fell 5% by comparison with the year before. Real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) incomes fell 15.6% by comparison with 1997. The ruble lost 71% of its value, ending 1998 at 20.65 to the U.S. dollar compared to 5.96 at the beginning of the year. Meanwhile, market reform was discredited in the eyes of much of the population. Anatoly Chubais, one of those who oversaw the early phases of Russia’s economic transformation, commented in September that he originally had expected Russia’s transition to the market to be difficult and to last "three, five, seven years." Now, he said, "it is clear that it will take decades."

The Economy

Alarmed by the nation’s financial crisis and determined to protect their populations from hardship, many of Russia’s regional leaders went their own ways without consulting the federal government. Tensions heightened as it became clear that the 1998 grain harvest would be the worst in more than 40 years. Many regions responded to the August crisis by imposing price controls on foodstuffs and trying to prevent the shipment of goods produced in their territories to neighbouring regions. The republics of Tatarstan and Kalmykia announced that they were halting the payment of taxes to the federal budget; Buryatia and the Samara region ordered local branches of Moscow banks not to transfer payments outside republic borders; and the Republic of Sakha declared that it was assuming control of its gold production and cutting back sales to the federal centre. Observers began to warn of a real danger that the Russian Federation might disintegrate--not by design but by default. With the exception of the breakaway Republic of Chechnya, which continued to maintain its independence, none of the regions wanted the federation to dissolve, but there was concern that the federal government was powerless to keep the country together.

As for war-ravaged Chechnya, the cash-strapped Russian government met none of its promises of financial aid. Russia, consequently, was unable to influence developments in the republic, where civil war seemed increasingly likely. Warlords resorted to kidnapping and gunrunning, and there were fears that lawlessness would spill over from Chechnya to neighbouring parts of the northern Caucasus. In October three British and one New Zealand engineers were kidnapped for ransom; their decapitated bodies were found in December.

Violent crime also continued in the rest of Russia. The nation was shocked by the assassination in St. Petersburg of Galina Starovoytova, one of Russia’s leading democratic parliamentarians, in November.

In July Yeltsin unexpectedly attended the entombment in St. Petersburg of Russia’s last tsar and his family. Yeltsin used the occasion to condemn the murders of the imperial family by the Bolsheviks as "one of the most shameful episodes" in Russian history. A commentator predicted that Yeltsin would be remembered for two things: "the overthrow of communism and the burial of the tsar."

Foreign Affairs

Russia’s foreign relations in 1998 were characterized by continuity. In September Primakov was replaced as foreign minister by his former first deputy and close political associate, Igor Ivanov. Russia lacked the political, military, and economic power to reclaim the U.S.S.R.’s role as a great power, but the government worked hard to maintain relations with old allies such as India and Iraq and to improve relations with China, Iran, and Japan. In May a telephone hot line opened between the Kremlin and the Chinese president’s office.

Tensions arose between Russia and the U.S. and its allies. In February Yeltsin warned that threatened U.S. military strikes against Iraq could spark a world war. Later in the year Moscow denounced NATO’s threats to use force against Serbia over its policy toward the province of Kosovo and the U.S.-British air strikes against Iraq. Primakov continued to voice strong opposition to NATO’s planned eastward enlargement, and Russia clashed with the U.S. over a lucrative Russian-Indian nuclear deal. During the summer the G-7 group of leading industrialized nations renamed itself the G-8 and welcomed Russian participation in its deliberations, but the innovation was quietly dropped after the August financial crisis revealed the full weakness of Russia’s economy.

By fall Russia’s foreign relations were becoming stymied by Yeltsin’s failing health. Meanwhile, a number of Russia’s republics pursued their own foreign relations with increasing vigour. This aroused resentment on the part of the federal government, which was, however, powerless to prevent it. Planned reforms of the military were stalled. This was due partly to lack of funding and partly to Yeltsin’s September firing of Security Council Secretary Andrey Kokoshin. The International Institute for Strategic Studies noted in its annual report that lack of money was undercutting Russia’s ability to carry out military operations. In May-July, for example, not one of Russia’s 26 nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines was at sea. There were reports of malnutrition among young conscripts and of hardship suffered by officers and their families as a result of wage arrears.

In December the Russian and Belarusian presidents signed a series of accords aimed at unifying their two countries, perhaps as soon as mid-1999, with a common currency and a common citizenship but retaining separate armed forces and distinct foreign policies. The move was seen by some as an attempt to promote the reintegration of the former Soviet republics.

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